Freshwater
Lakes, rivers, and wetlands with diverse aquatic ecosystems.
Animals of the Freshwater
Species recorded in this habitat.
African Bullfrog
Pyxicephalus adspersus
The African bullfrog inverts the usual amphibian rule that females are the larger sex: males can exceed 2 kg and grow roughly twice the size of the females they mate with, because male-male combat over breeding pools rewards bulk. Along the lower jaw sit three odontoid projections â bony, tooth-like spikes that let it hold struggling prey, and give a bite that draws blood. It eats essentially anything it can cram down, including rodents, birds, other frogs, and famously young cobras. Its most remarkable behaviour is paternal: a male guards the tadpole mass, and when the puddle begins to evaporate he will excavate a channel with his hind legs to drain water from a shrinking pool into a larger one, saving the shoal. He is not sentimental about it â he also eats a share of the tadpoles he is guarding. Between rains the frog burrows down and encases itself in a cocoon built from layers of shed skin, sealing in moisture, and can wait out drought underground for a year or more.
African Butterflyfish
Pantodon buchholzi
The African Butterflyfish is a distinctive freshwater fish known for its broad, wing-like pectoral fins and surface-dwelling lifestyle. Native to slow-moving rivers and swamps of West and Central Africa, this fish is specially adapted for life at the water's surface, where it hunts insects and small invertebrates. Its flattened body and upturned mouth allow it to capture prey efficiently, while its camouflage helps avoid predators. African Butterflyfish are popular in the aquarium trade due to their unique appearance and fascinating behaviors.
African cichlid
Various (notably Pseudotropheus zebra, Haplochromis burtoni, and others)
African cichlids are a diverse group of freshwater fish native primarily to the Great Rift Valley lakes of East Africa, especially Lakes Malawi, Tanganyika, and Victoria. They are renowned for their vivid coloration, complex social behaviors, and remarkable adaptability, with hundreds of species exhibiting a wide range of shapes and sizes. African cichlids are popular in the aquarium trade due to their striking appearance and active personalities, but they require specialized care. Their rapid speciation and ecological diversity make them a key subject in evolutionary biology studies. These fish play important roles in their native ecosystems, contributing to the unique biodiversity of African freshwater habitats.
African Clawed Frog
Xenopus laevis
Xenopus laevis is a frog built for a life entirely in water: it has no tongue, no eardrum and no visible ears, and it shovels food into its mouth with its hands. Along its flanks run rows of stitch-like sensory organs â a lateral line retained into adulthood, which is unusual for a frog and lets it feel the water displaced by prey in muddy ponds. Its "claws" are three black keratinised toe tips on each hind foot, used to shred carrion. Males call underwater without moving air at all, clicking by snapping cartilage discs in the larynx. Its strangest cultural role came in the 1930s, when the Hogben test made it the world's pregnancy test: hormone in a woman's urine, injected into a female frog, made her lay eggs within hours, and hospitals kept tanks of them for three decades. That global trade in laboratory frogs is now strongly implicated in spreading the chytrid fungus that has since devastated amphibians on several continents â Xenopus carries it while largely resisting it.
African Helmeted Turtle
Pelomedusa subrufa
The African Helmeted Turtle is a small to medium-sized freshwater turtle known for its distinctive domed shell and broad, flattened head. Found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, it is highly adaptable and inhabits a variety of freshwater bodies, including ponds, lakes, and slow-moving rivers. This turtle is famous for its ability to survive in temporary water sources by burrowing into mud during dry periods, a behavior known as aestivation. It is an opportunistic feeder, consuming a wide range of animal and plant matter. African Helmeted Turtles are also known for their social basking behavior and occasional group hunting.
African Jacana
Actophilornis africanus
The African jacana runs the standard bird family upside down. Females are about 1.5 times heavier than males, hold a territory, and mate with up to four of them; the males build the nests, incubate the eggs, and raise the chicks alone. A father moves his brood by scooping the chicks up under his wings and walking off with four sets of tiny legs dangling from his flanks â one of the strangest silhouettes in African wetlands. The bird's most obvious feature is its feet: toes and claws so absurdly elongated that its weight is spread across floating lily pads, letting it stroll over open water and earning it the names lily-trotter and Jesus bird. Chicks can dive and hide beneath the surface, clamping onto submerged vegetation with only the bill tip exposed to breathe. It feeds on insects and snails picked from the undersides and surfaces of floating leaves, flipping pads over with the bill. Its range spans sub-Saharan floodplains, swamps and lagoons wherever water lilies persist.
African lungfish
Protopterus annectens
An African lungfish will drown if you hold it underwater. Its gills are vestigial and it must surface to fill a pair of true lungs â an obligate air-breather among fish. When its swamp dries, it burrows into the mud, secretes a mucus cocoon that hardens around it leaving a breathing tube to the surface, converts its ammonia waste into far less toxic urea, and drops its metabolism as much as sixtyfold. In that state it can wait out drought for months, and there are records of individuals reviving after several years. Its heart has a partly divided atrium and a spiral valve in the outflow tract, keeping oxygenated and deoxygenated blood partly separate â an arrangement much closer to an amphibian's than to a typical fish's. The thin, filamentous pelvic fins are not decorative: laboratory work has shown Protopterus lifting its body off the bottom and "walking" on them with alternating strides, which reframes how tetrapod-style locomotion could have begun in water rather than on land. Lungfish are lobe-finned, and are more closely related to you than to a salmon.
African Reed Frog
Hyperolius viridiflavus
The African Reed Frog is a small, agile amphibian known for its vibrant coloration and remarkable adaptability. These frogs are typically found in wetlands, marshes, and reed beds throughout sub-Saharan Africa, often displaying a variety of colors and patterns, ranging from greens and yellows to browns and even blues. Their skin secretes a waxy substance that helps prevent dehydration, enabling them to thrive in both permanent and temporary water bodies. African Reed Frogs are especially famous for their loud, distinctive calls during the breeding season, which can be heard echoing across wetlands at dusk and night.
African Rock Python
Python sebae
The African Rock Python is Africa's largest snake and one of the largest python species in the world. Characterized by its thick, muscular body and distinctive dark blotched pattern, it can grow up to 6 meters (20 feet) in length. This non-venomous constrictor is highly adaptable and found across a wide range of habitats, including savannas, forests, and near water bodies. African Rock Pythons are solitary and ambush predators, relying on stealth and power to subdue large prey such as antelope, monitor lizards, and even crocodiles. Despite their formidable size, they face threats from habitat loss and hunting.
Alligator gar
Atractosteus spatula
The alligator gar is the largest fish that lives its whole life in fresh water in North America, reaching 2.5 m and over 130 kg, and it is armoured in a way no bony fish alive today matches. Its scales are ganoid: diamond-shaped, coated in a hard enamel-like layer of ganoine over a tough bony base, and interlocked into a lattice that behaves like chainmail â Native peoples used gar scales as arrowheads and gar hide as a covering for ploughs and shields. It breathes air through a vascularised swim bladder, which lets it hold on in the hot, oxygen-starved backwaters and oxbows where most predators suffocate. For most of the twentieth century it was branded a "trash fish" and deliberately culled by state agencies, which shot and netted them to protect sport fisheries; that view has reversed, and it is now valued as a native apex predator with a genuine appetite for invasive carp. It is also slow to recover from any of this: females may not spawn until around age ten and can live past fifty.
Alligator Snapping Turtle
Macrochelys temminckii
The alligator snapping turtle is one of very few vertebrates that fishes with a lure. It lies on the river bottom with its jaws open and wiggles a pink, worm-shaped appendage on the floor of its tongue; a fish that comes to inspect the "worm" is taken by a strike that closes the jaws in a fraction of a second. It is a genuine ambush specialist that may sit motionless for so long that algae grow on its shell, and its three high ridges of keels, hidden eyes set at the sides of the head, and hooked beak separate it clearly from the far more aggressive common snapper. The popular claim that it can bite through a broomstick is not true: measured bite forces are around 150 pounds of force, respectable but comparable to a large dog and well below the crushing power of many turtles that eat shellfish. Males can exceed 100 kg. Populations across the Mississippi basin were gutted in the twentieth century by commercial harvest for turtle soup, and the species is slow-maturing enough that recovery takes decades.
Alpine Newt
Ichthyosaura alpestris
The Alpine Newt is a striking amphibian native to central and southern Europe, particularly thriving in mountainous regions. It is recognized for its slender body, smooth skin, and vibrant breeding colors, with males displaying a bright orange belly and blue flanks during the mating season. Alpine Newts are semi-aquatic, spending part of their lives in freshwater ponds and part on land in moist, shaded habitats. They are known for their adaptability, often inhabiting high-altitude lakes, forest pools, and garden ponds. Despite facing localized threats, their populations remain stable across much of their range.
Other habitats
Elevated TerrainMountain
High-altitude environments with varying climates and specialized wildlife adapted to rugged terrain and thin air.
Tropical RegionsRainforest
Dense, wet forests with the highest biodiversity on Earth, containing more than half of the world's plant and animal species.
Polar RegionsArctic
Cold, frozen landscapes around the North Pole with specialized wildlife adapted to extreme cold.
Arid RegionsDesert
Arid lands with minimal rainfall, extreme temperatures, and specialized wildlife adapted to harsh conditions.
Global WatersOcean
Saltwater environments covering more than 70% of the Earth's surface, home to a vast variety of marine life.
AfricaSavanna
Grasslands with scattered trees, characterized by seasonal rainfall and home to diverse grazing animals and predators.